Spectre & Shadow in Wm. Blake's "Milton"

 "Blake's Tharmas, while one of the four Zoas, receives little
attention as such outside Vala.  In Eden he is perception, or, more
accurately, Man's power to create his world.  (There is no
subject-object distinction in Blake's highest realm.)  Thus, Tharmas is
the "Parent Power" underlying the workings of the other Zoas.  Tharmas
is associated especially with Beulah, the dimension of sensation and
passive experience rather than of creation and conflict.  With the
closure of the Western Gate belonging to this Zoa, imaginative control
over the perceptions was lost, and Man came to experience the world of
matter.  Tharmas divided into a Spectre and an amorphous residue.  The
surviving Zoa becomes the life-force.  He begets monsters by
spontaneous generation from chaos, and orders Los to his anvil to forge
a new world of solid forms.  As the Zoa who governs the experience of
the unfallen world, Tharmas is also the sense of being happy and knows
when things are wrong.  Thus in Vala, after his own fall during the
struggles of Luvah and Urizen, he knocked Luvah from the sky in anger,
and later did the same to Urizen.  While he is always expressing his
feelings in some way or other, and thus functions as a sort of chorus,
he does nothing constructive.

    "In the later Milton and Jerusalem, the conception of a divided
Tharmas was abandoned, and the Spectre was equated with the Covering
Cherub of Ezekiel.  The Spectre of Tharmas is called the False Tongue
itself, because the error of perception is basic.  The fallen Man
perceives only a hostile, alien world around him and supposedly thinks
that he must act accordingly.  As Tharmas grants perceptions in Eden,
the Cherub causes the natural person to perceive a solid material
world.  Tharmas is the vitality that bestows imaginative life in Eden;
the Cherub is the Selfhood's idea of the life-giving spirit.  Every
advance in biology has confirmed the view that our species is a product
of a complicated chemical process and is evolved ultimately from a few
types of subatomic particles.  As Urizen is the sky-god, the Covering
Cherub is the limiting sky surrounding the world of matter and cutting
off the vision of Eternity.  As he is ultimately the fallen person's
whole view of the world, the Covering Cherub's tyranny encompasses all
errors that keep us from enjoying the fellowship of all people, whether
they are political (9:51), "moral", scientific, artistic, or religious
(37:16-8).  Satan, the natural heart, falls enfolded by the Cherub as
by a deadly constricting snake (12:46), a classical symbol for matter
[3].

    "The most famous symbol for Tharmas is the ocean, which is
appropriate for several reasons.  Kathleen Raine says a great deal
about water as a Neoplatonic image of matter [4], and Carl Jung found
the sea to be the "commonest symbol for the unconscious" [5], source of
all imaginative perception of the fallen man.  As the sea engulfs all
things, it is a fine symbol for the ever-devouring false Tongue; as it
reflects heaven in its quiet moments, it becomes a symbol of the
redeemed Tharmas (M 25:71).  Finally, as matter, the Spectre of Tharmas
(like his closest literary relative, Milton's Anarch Chaos), can give
rise to nothing living.  Left alone, it will eventually disintegrate
into a "sea of atoms" [6], or, as Blake expresses it:


    The Natural Power continually seeks & tends to Destruction
    Ending in Death: which would of itself be Eternal Death

                                         -- Milton 26:41-2


    "All material things tend to deteriorate into formlessness.  Thus
Blake can say that the Covering Cherub, or natural power, pursues
death, a process arrested only by the fixing of the "limits of opacity
and contraction".  All Spectres seek the deaths of others out of fear
and jealousy.  By remaining unregenerate we are also working toward our
own nonexistence.  The image of the gloomy "death" the erring Milton
had chosen for himself in life is called "Milton's Shadow".

    "While much has been written to make clear what Blake meant by a
"spectre", less has been said about the quite different conception of a
"shadow".  Any shadow is the form of a thing without its substance or
life, appearing opposite the light source.  A review of the Felpham
letters and later works shows that Blake often spoke of all material
things and persons as "shadows" of their Eternal beings.  The concept
of the shadow must therefore be related to the material reality which
helps or hinders the visionary.  In the late strata of The Four Zoas,
the shadows are the female counterparts to the spectres of the Zoas --
pale, static, inconsequential things.  They are the soft of emanations
spectres would desire, just as the material shadow seems to "emanate"
from a material man.  The invisible, wailing Enion, the lost Ahania,
the laboring Vala, and Orc's silly goddess of purity, white Enitharmon,
are all called "shadows", and are all that remains of their original
forms in Ulro.  So is the "Shadowy Female", personification of nature.
Albion's "Shadow" is the idiotic, voiceless creature that arises from
him and to which he prays to forgive his sexual sins (J 43:33-54).

    "So the Shadow of Milton is probably the Spectre's version of what
the human being ought to be.  It is the pathetic image or parody of the
self-sacrificing and productive Humanity of Milton; it is at once the
roles he invented for himself and the errors that interacted with them.

    "Milton's Shadow is "a mournful form", dismal as John Milton was
when "covered" with the earthly body.  Being mournful is the loveless
spectrous version of being a solitary prophet speaking against evil.
Blake's heroic Milton, while he is "severe and silent" (38:8), is not
doleful or without hope.  As Milton's experience of the fallen world,
the Shadow encompasses all errors, and extends from Beulah through the
twenty-seven heavens (human history) to the earth.  This begins the
suggestion that the Shadow, formed of the material of the Covering
Cherub, is the Cherub.  Milton enters the gloomy shape, and begins his
voyage as "Milton's Human Shadow" (17:18).  As Blake prepares to travel
to Golgonooza, the Shadow separates (20:20-2), flying from the fierce
visionary and going to "brood" over the frozen Milton in Sinai, just as
the Cherub hovers over humankind in general.  Blake is punning -- the
dismal Shadow  frets over Milton, but it is also "brooding" in the
sense that Milton spoke of the Holy Spirit as a dove brooding to make
chaos fertile (Paradise Lost I, 21).  The action of the Shadow is an
impossible parody of regeneration.  Again Blake seems to identify
Cherub and Shadow:


    For that portion namd the Elect: the Spectrous body of Milton:
    Redounding from my left foot into Los's Mundane space,
    Brooded over his Body in Horeb against the Resurrection
    Preparing it for the Great Consummation; red the Cherub on Sinai
    Glow'd; but in terrors folded round his clouds of blood.

                                         -- Milton 20:20-4


    "The Shadow appears again, as the Cherub (37:4-12), in definite
form and ready to be cast out by the awakened Milton.  Before it is
given this shape, it is compared to a "polypus" (15:8).  Readers of
Blake know that this can mean either an octopus or a type of malignant
growth; here both are very appropriate.  Error spreads invasively and
grows like cancer, and all of a cancer must be removed before a cure is
effected.  An octopus is a shapeless, clinging, soft-bodied sea
creature with many extensions, one that avoids light and obscures
itself in clouds of black ink.

    "Why did Milton enter the Shadow to return to the material world?
The Shadow is the material reality with which the personality of Milton
dealt in life.  Being twenty-seven-fold, extending through Ulro, and
being likened to a polypus indicates that it is the unregenerated world
which Milton perceived while on earth.  However, since every person's
way of looking at the world is distinctive to the person, the shadow is
properly the Tharmic portion of one's personality.  Because it is part
subject, part object, it is "hermaphroditic; male and female / In one
wonderful body" (14:37-8), just like Tharmas.  Even though it is a body
of error, the Shadow must be rejoined if the errors committed in the
body are to be redeemed.  Until the apocalypse, anyone who wishes to
act in the time-and-space world needs to have some view of it.  Milton
travels in his Shadow until he joins Blake.  Then the Shadow is
discarded and John Milton can see the world with fresh eyes.4. Luvah: Milton as Orc


         Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
         Hungry clouds swag on the deep

         Once meek, and in a perilous path,
         The just man kept his course along
         The vale of death.
         Roses are planted where thorns grow.
         And on the barren heath
         Sing the honey bees.

         Then the perilous path was planted:
         And a river, and a spring
         On every cliff and tomb;
         And on the bleached bones
         Red clay brought forth.

         Till the villain left the paths of ease,
         To walk in perilous paths, and drive
         The just man into barren climes.

         Now the sneaking serpent walks
         In mild humility.
         And the just man rages in the wilds
         Where lions roam.

         Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
         Hungry clouds swag on the deep

                       -- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 2"

from  http://www.pathguy.com/blake/blakemil.txt